Separation
by EternallyImperfect
Summary: Separation for Loki has always felt this way, piercing, sharp like abandonment. Oneshot. Based on events in Thor Ragnarok.


Okay, so this has probably been done to death now, but this is a study of Loki in Ragnarok. Sort of. I had a lot of feelings about that scene where Thor zaps Loki with that device and then leaves him, and this just kind of built up from that.

If you read this, thanks for looking! I read a lot, but I'm a real noob about writing stories so here goes nothing haha.

* * *

Loki hits the ground violently, pain thrilling through him, a surge of energy gripping him tight. His brother is bending gently over him, and as Loki searches his eyes he finds no trace of tenderness; this is not the same man who held him, hand warm against his neck, _"You come home."_ Thor smiles at him, but it is a distant thing. Pain, Loki has found through the trials of recent years, brings his focus to a sharpened point rather than overwhelms - he hears plainly every word.

"Round and round in circles we go."

This game is finished, this cycle upon which both brothers have cut and defined themselves - where Thor was the brightness, the lightning, and Loki was his shade, the moon, the night. So much loss has emboldened Thor to find himself free and gifted him with his own darkness. Thor leaves, Loki discarded, needless, on foreign ground. Loki finds himself adrift, a hollow conduit for the torment that pulses through him in waves.

His nerves are on fire; he remembers Svartalfheim - in the play he had prolonged that moment where Thor held him. His skin aches for a warm and kind touch. Thor never looks back once - Loki processes the loss - before he realizes with shock: sentiment.

Separation for Loki has always felt this way, piercing, sharp like abandonment. Thor leaves him a space yet ( _You could be so much more_ ) and when he gets up again, Loki has decided. He slots himself back into that place beside his brother. Of the two, Thor has always known better how to live without him.

-0-

"I hate them," he is a child and speaking petulantly to Frigga. Even then anger was a better option than the alternative.

"Thor and I used to play our sword fight games together."

For a moment she purses her lips. "Do they not allow you to join them?"

"No! They do," he cries simply, because that is not his meaning. What he means is, Thor has found new and exciting friends, faster and more charming than me, and he lights up when he talks to them, so that sometimes he cannot hear me in the raucous merriment that they enjoy. I am drowned and worthless and insignificant, he would say but he is too young and is not yet familiar with those feelings.

Instead he says, "I _hate_ them, I wish Jörmungandr would take them all."

And then the anger isn't enough, and he is a child crying before his mother.

"Oh Loki," Frigga says, in that sad thoughtful way Loki will recognize so many years later when he pushes her away and loses her forever.

"Thor needs to be his own person, as do you."

There was no comfort in that, but there was when she pulled him in and held him tightly, warmly, his face pressed into her chest. He could barely breathe as it stifled his crying, and he hoped she would never let go.

-0-

He has let them all go, because they were never his to keep in the first place. But the loss strips him and leaves him with raging anger and little else to grasp onto. There are no longer any arms in which he can bury himself, and so he buries himself in what he has left.

Below them Midgard plummets into flame and chaos. For one second, Loki can see the devastation through Thor's eyes, not the city only but he glimpses himself, the distorted, broken image of a person who used to be Thor's brother.

"It's too late. It's too late to stop it."

When he says it, he believes it. Thor does not know what it is to live within the endless hollow of the Void, but there is a part of Loki where it stays, hollow and trapped and ugly. This is not life.

And yet Thor almost beams at him - he leans in so close, like they were children again and plotting mischief - and says, "No, we can. Together."

Loki looks at Thor and thinks, _you have never known loss. All this sentiment_. Then the anger finds him back, that Thor should think to lay claim on him when Loki knows that he had never had Thor, nor Frigga, nor Odin, was never theirs, even if all of him wants to be.

There is no space to cry here, so he numbs the loss in the violence and laughs instead. He leaves Thor with a knife in the side because separations, he's learned, are always painful.

-0-

Frigga leaves and Loki does not have the chance to hold her again. Strangely, this loss tempers his rage rather than fuels it. Loki finds that he does not want his father dead, but he does want what he has not found for a while: quiet.

Alone on Asgard, he finally allows himself to retread the old wounds his younger self buried away. He reviews the day Odin shattered his existence, and he wishes he had listened, and he wishes that Odin had just said it plainly that day: I love you.

Those memories feel foreign and belong to some part of Loki that died years ago. He reclaims them and decides this is a story he wants to share. It is validating for once and he wishes all of it were true. He paints himself the love he wishes he had recognized and, because he is Loki, he embellishes it further. The false Thor holds the false Loki tighter and closer, while Loki, alone on Odin's couch, looks on and longs for more.

Somewhere, amidst the fantasy, Loki comes to the realization that he has not lost everything.

-0-

It is true that their family has not been a unit for a long time, but Odin's death feels like a final blow. I love you no longer holds the resolution for Loki that he once thought it would. Instead it feels like another abandonment. His father is gone and somehow takes his brother another step further away from him as well.

Another time Loki would have spitefully driven the wedge between them deeper. But it is also true that Loki has been dying too much for a long time, and now, in the face of Ragnarok, he realizes he would like to live. He cannot actually imagine life without Thor.

-0-

"You're late," Thor tells him, battered, shorn and missing one eye - warm, alive, there is love written in the yet familiar lines of his bloodied face. Loki recognizes his brother and he thinks, But it's not too late.

Another realm burns around them, but this time it is their own, and it burns in both their hearts. This time they are together. Loki is side by side with Thor again, working on that wavelength that had once thrummed constantly between them, before they grew apart.

Some fights even the mighty Thor cannot win. The Realm Eternal collapses and is lost forever. Loki can feel the weight of the loss on Thor as much as he feels it within himself. They are face to face on a Sakaarian ship, almost strangers, the distance grown over past years another perceptible weight between them.

But Loki has had enough of loss. Thor reaches out, and Loki does not reach for a knife, but he remains in place.

"I'm here," he says.

It fills him entirely when Thor crosses over and embraces him, and for just this moment, it is enough.


End file.
